Mike`s Blog

The appeal was compelling and I actually read the license.

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As a preparation for long-term performance measurements, (sometimes called Continuous Performance Management or CPM), I tried to automate the creation of JProfiler profiling snapshots and, along the way, came up with the following side product: Automated per-test method profiling.

Basically, the idea is to go from here:

to here

"What's so great about this?", you wonder?

Read the full article for fancy screenshots and code snippets.

(Btw, the test cases are due to this question. Usually, i don't do String performance tests

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• Continue reading "Per-unit-test profiling"

There's a Stackoverflow question about controversial programming opinions:
The top ten as voted by the SO community:

1. The only "best practice" you should be using all the time is Use Your Brain
2. Most comments in code are in fact a pernicious form of code duplication
3. Programmers who don't code in their spare time for fun, will never become as good as those that do
4. Not all programmers are created equal
5. XML is highly overrated
6. "Googling it" is okay!
7. I fail to understand why people think that Java is absolutely the best "first" programming language to be taught in universities
8. If you only know *one language*, no matter how well you know it, you're not a great programmer
9. Performance does matter
10. The Business Apps farce (You have to read it to understand)

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Played a bit with my own twitter client and pimped it to visualize replies. It uses Neo4j for the relationships and Eclipse GEF ZEST for the visualization. New incoming tweets are analyzed for @-replies and integrated into the graph in realtime, but animation is missing and manual layouting is still needed to get some clear structure (see first screenshot).

The Radial layout algorithm does a good job though, but it's not the perfect solution for this problem (left side). Applying first the Radial layout and then the Horizontal Shift layout however shows a nice effect (also added profile images):

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When playing tower defense games, it's helpful to know the strength of your weapons. It helps to calculate the best strategy for defending the base against the enemy waves.

For Star Defense (iPhone/iPod game, version 1.3) by ngmoco, i've collected the weapon information for gauss turrets, quantum launchers, DX-3 slow effect weapon, neo-plasma blasters and for phase coils. The sheet below shows initial damage (hitpoints), fire rate (per second), range, duration for effect weapons like the neo-plasma blaster and the effect damage, the speed factor for slow-effect for each of the weapons and for each of the upgrade levels. I've also included the the price of the weapons and the total cost when fully upgraded.



Happy defending!

P.S. How do you get beyond wave 58 on Magna Prime?

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